Another Aspect of Microaggression

Campus Bullying: Microaggressions are the resort of the weakling, the coward, and most of all, the intellectually immature. They are the petulant tantrums of spoiled children, who are in unfamiliar territory: not getting their own way merely because they exist. They find that they can assert Victimhood as a weapon, and that the "adults" will collapse immediately and even join them. This is a different type of bullying, and it is becoming prevalent.

This generation of brats has discovered social icons which provide them with full support from the uniformly mindless Left: Racism; Feminism; Environmentalism; Egalitarianism; multiculturalism; monolithic collective ideology. These they learned in government schools, and now demand of increasingly useless university systems - protection from perceptions of violation of the Leftist religious tenets. The perceptions need not be based in reality, need no witnesses, no evidence, no intent, no motive. All that is required is a statement of "discomfort". From this, there is no defense, except total capitulation, which is followed by expulsion.

The tactic is mob demands (not requests: demands) for evermore absurd and vaporous progressiveness forced upon campuses despite their imposition on the rights of others, not to mention the unenforceability (a tactic which guarantees the perpetuation of the mobs "outrage").

Here a long time professor muses on the issue:

"It is not enough, however, to denounce the pathologies of the witch hunters, the childish cruelty of the denouncers, or the timorousness of the population from whom the witches are plucked. What is needed is an argument, and with it a set of values, that can explain to young people what it means to be an intellectually mature—that is to say, an independent and resilient—adult who will reject such behavior as unworthy of an educated person and incompatible with a free society.

To that end one might summon a different representative of Old New England, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in particular his essay “Self Reliance,” published in 1841. No one can ignore his liberal pedigree: a free thinker, an abolitionist, a feminist, and multicultural before his time (he read widely in and quoted from the Hindu sacred texts, for example). There is much in it, but perhaps nothing so precious as this paragraph:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

To live this way can be hard, Emerson knew:

“For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.” But surely one purpose of an education is to know how to form one’s own conclusions, and stand for them even if the crowd bays against you.

That insolent teenagers behave the way they do is unfortunate. What is menacing is when they become a mob. If their teachers can get them to understand that they are in fact acting as a mob; that by calling for the persecution of those who do not conform they are the heirs not of Martin Luther King, Jr. but of Joe McCarthy, it may be the start of their awakening. The students might even, with assistance, discover the respect that liberal thought once accorded to the lonely individual who stands up for what he or she knows is right—someone like the principled doctor in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People or the retiring sheriff in High Noon.

The pervasiveness of social media makes the act of standing alone, of being one’s own man or woman, much harder than before. We all wish to be “liked” and we know that the best way to be “followed” is to “follow” others. Retweet and you shall be retweeted. But perhaps there is a core in some of these protestors that a liberal case for standing apart from the crowd could touch. Emerson’s creed, like that of Thoreau after him, should appeal to the anxious young because it is a creed of strength. The shrill petulance of today’s college protestors depresses observers because these talented young people see themselves as weak, vulnerable, psychologically frail, desperately in need of coddling. In another age these students’ demands to be cushioned against every one of life’s psychic blows would, properly, be seen as contemptible, and their willingness to bully anyone who gets in their way as a threat."

A subset of Egalitarianism, which makes all colors equal but rejects contrary thought, is multiculturalism. The premise is that all cultures are equal and therefore should live together homogeneously in proportion to the size of their individual populations, and is taken as an unassailable moral first principle.

But it is false. Some cultures are built on hatred of other cultures; some cultures are built on the concept of world domination. The failure to recognize this is a logical failure of absence of objective reality, a reality which is readily observable empirically. Thus the premise of "all cultures are equal" is demonstrably false.

The Logic of Microaggressions

A microaggression is actually an accusation of invisible offense. The offense occurs in the mind of the offended. The offender is often incapable of changing the conditions which offend the offended. An example of this is “white privilege”, which a white person cannot change without specifically rejecting his own heritage in the presence of the offended.

But there is an illogic to microaggression which is pointed to by Classical Values:

“…because once you understand the doctrine, you will realize that any expression of doubt over a microaggression — whether real or perceived — is itself a microaggression, just as taking issue with the concept of microaggression theory is of course a major microaggression.”

The concept behind each declaration of microaggression is tautology, supported by diktat. It is also intellectually circular, being grounded in the opinion of the accuser. It cannot be grounded materially, because it is solely a moral position.

What this means is that each new microaggression is declared to be a First Principle, a universal Truth which is unquestionable. In addition, questioning either the specific offense or the factuality of the First Principle violates the First Principle and is a microagresssion. Finally, microaggressions are not physical universal principles, they are moral universal First Principles and therefore either committing or questioning them is a moral failure: a Sin.

So it can be plainly seen that the concept of microaggression is a religious tenet of serious consequence to the religion of Leftism.

Now let’s return to White Privilege. If one rejects his own heritage in order to placate a member of the Leftist Religion of Egalitarianism, he is rejecting reality. This is a logic failure. What is not understood is that the western heritage is not exclusively white, it is available to all, and has been transported around the world - to the extent that personal freedom can be tolerated in local venues.

There are several issues with this. First, this Leftist Moral religion can exist only in either free western cultures, or in dictatorships. Since the connection with dictatorship is obvious, or should be, let’s discuss the impact of this religion in free western-type cultures.

This Leftist Religion of Egalitarianism uses the rite of microaggression as a fear-based membership tool. One who is willing to reject his ancestry and its contributions to culture and human well-being is acceptable to the Cult of Leftist Religious Egalitarianism.

But one who insists on reality, as being based not in moral First Principles, but being based in epistemological and ontological First Principles, cannot be a member of the Church of Leftist Egalitarianism.

That’s where diktat comes in, of course. Such a person, being reality based, must not only be rejected from the Leftist Moral Compound, he must be destroyed. Why? Because he is evil. He does not genuflect to Leftist threats.

And that is the next logical failure: in a world with no Truth, no Lies, no Morals, the Leftist Cult of Moral Egalitarianism condemns its critics as morally unfit, moral outcasts, to be deprived of whatever influence they might have had, had they capitulated to the charges against them, and admitted their Sins by debasing themselves before their accusers. The use of moral testing in a world with no morals is self-contradictory.

Finally, should a person capitulate and become one of the Cult of Leftist Egalitarianism, he becomes totally free – free to lie, free sexually (think Clinton), free of all other pre-existing moral constraints, which are ancient artifacts of a lost culture.

Leftist Logic

DC Police Chief who approves almost no concealed carry permits wants armed citizens to take action

Like vigilantes, maybe?

Where Is Liberal Rage Over Mass Shooting In New Orleans?

Well, it's just blacks shooting (innocent, mostly) blacks, 17 in fact. Those black lives don't matter, of course; blacks can shoot whoever they want. It's whites that must be kept in line. Nothing racist or newsworthy here, move along now.

Women's group can't accept that 'rape culture' just might not be a thing
When you're committed to perpetuating the myth of a rampant "rape culture" on college campuses, evidence to the contrary becomes baffling.

And so it goes for the American Association of University Women, which analyzed 2014 reporting data from colleges and universities across the country and found that 91 percent of schools had no reported incidents of rape. Most people would see that number and cheer. Hooray! College women aren't being raped in the U.S. at rates on par with the Congo!

But not the AAUW. Accompanying that percentage on a chart on its website are the words: "What's wrong with this picture?"

"When campuses report zero incidents of rape, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking, it simply does not square with research, campus climate surveys, and widespread experiences reported by students," the AAUW wrote.

Let's stop right there. Those "campus climate surveys" are the "research" they're talking about, unless they're referring to David Lisak's "studies," which have been thoroughly debunked this year, as have those [rape] climate surveys.

The biggest problem with the surveys is that they broadly define sexual assault to include pretty much every human interaction. And it's not actually the students participating who say they are victims of sexual assault; often, it's the researchers conducting the surveys — researchers who have a stake in proving "rape culture" exists and that women are oppressed.

Every report that is non-congruent with the narrative is just... wrong.

Good Question

Why Does Global Warming Only Turn Muslims Into Terrorists?

"Global warming is the cause of terrorism in the Middle East and around the world according to Martin O’Malley, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and other Democrats. Let’s add in the Prince of Wales. With a straight face they make this claim, ignoring any and all other evidence to the contrary.

But if that is so, if global warming causes terrorism, then I think the Democrats need to answer this question: why does global warming only turn Muslims into terrorists?

There are Jews in the Middle East and Africa. There are Christians in the Middle East and Africa. There are animists, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and others. But only certain Muslims, often from wealthy families, turn into terrorists. The Jews, Christians, animists, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and the rest never seem to be affected by global warming in that way.

Perhaps instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to explore why lesbians are fat, the federal government should spend some cash on why global warming turns only Muslims into terrorists."

Well, send me a couple hundred $K and I'll be happy to write up a "scientific" analysis. For another $100k I'll even throw in a graph.

Quote of the Day

"THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO A LEFTY: HATING THE RIGHT PEOPLE. Bette Midler: ‘Caitlyn may be a woman – but she’s still a Republican.’"

Sicilian Mafia Will Protect NYC

Finally! Someone who is pro-active!

Gangs of New York: Sicilian mafia offers Big Apple protection from 'psychopathic' ISIS

Life is interesting in the 21st century.

Enviro-Idiocy

An interesting juxtapositioning by Drudge:

PRINCE CHARLES: 'Climate change' root cause of Syrian war...

FLASHBACK: Scientist Declared 'Global Warming' Caused Hitler...

Now that it has been shown that peer review is virtually useless, AND we know that empirical restrictions such as replication of experimental process and confirmation of results are no longer part of science, why, any stupid statement by a "scientist" becomes "science". And who wants to be a science denier? Well, I, for one, am proud to deny bad, non-empirical claims any value whatsoever. These claims qualify for that.

Caitlyn vs. Radical Islamists

No it's not a one woMan war, it's a war of definitions to which the Left must adhere in order to keep its narrative straight. Specifically, Hillary and Obama are good with calling Bruce Jenner "Caitlyn" despite the scientific, factual and obvious truth that he is an XY, penis/testicle carrying male. In Jenner's case, it is possible to define yourself as you wish, and the Left will abide by that new definition.

However, with the Islamic State, Hillary, Obama and the Left refuse to acknowledge what the observable facts, AND the self-definition presents as obvious truth: They are Islamic; they are jihadists; they are terrorists. But the Leftists cannot say the words, "Islamic Terrorists".

"Liberals/progressives defend Islam so vigorously that they insist on qualifying “jihad” with the adjective “radical,” and they refuse to utter the (accurate) phrase “radical Islam.” How ironic that these liberals/progressives–who repeatedly evince an overt hostility to religion, and who wave the banner of “tolerance” in our faces, to the point of aggression–are so deeply committed to defending such intolerant, religiously motivated actions and beliefs."
Glenn Reynolds

The Left loves Islam because Islam cannot abide the west, and neither can the Left. Islam must be repackaged for mass consumption as the peaceful religion which it is not. And it must be imported in order to drive out the Christians which made actual religious tolerance possible. But actual tolerance is not a Leftist principle: they share the desire of Islam to rule the entire globe. But they deceive themselves into thinking that Islamists will share power with the Left, which has been so supportive of the "religion of peace". That won't happen. And Caitlyn and the homosexuals will be the first to go, followed by Hillary and the feminists. Interestingly, "People of the Book" may be allowed to pay the Jizya tax, and allowed to live.

"The West — Europe, in particular —is in a terrifying bind, for it has living in its midst substantial populations of Muslims, the majority of whom are poorly integrated into Western society. And by integration I don’t simply mean a case of Abdul or Cherif or Aicha getting up every morning to go to work with other citizens of Belgium or France or Denmark, but an embracing of the civic and social and constitutional values of these countries — what might, by useful shorthand, be called the Western “way of life”.

To the extent that we have the full facts, we know that every single perpetrator of the carnage in Paris was home-grown. That is a chilling fact (and phrase), conjuring visions of a venom that eats away at the body-politic, with echoes of a cancer in the human body. The fault, I fear, is that of Europe’s elites. For decades, they ignored — and even actively worked against — integration, scorning it as unfashionable, old-fangled, and, worst of all, racist. Is Our Way, they asked, with impressively self-destructive hubris, really better than Their Way?

That question now has an answer. It’s an answer the West must live and, increasingly, die with."
TUNKU VARADARAJAN

This is big!

Room Temperature Entanglement in a Semiconductor Substrate

It took less than a decade to go from a single cat-whisker transistor to commercial PNP transistors. Then another decade to get to commercial integrated circuits. If this is real, and if it translates to gate-type devices, the impact will be phenomenal.

Quantum entanglement achieved at room temperature in semiconductor wafers

""We know that the spin states of atomic nuclei associated with semiconductor defects have excellent quantum properties at room temperature," said Awschalom, Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They are coherent, long-lived and controllable with photonics and electronics. Given these quantum 'pieces,' creating entangled quantum states seemed like an attainable goal."

In addition to being of fundamental physical interest, "the ability to produce robust entangled states in an electronic-grade semiconductor at ambient conditions has important implications on future quantum devices," Awschalom said.

In the short-term, the techniques used here in combination with sophisticated devices enabled by advanced SiC device-fabrication protocols could enable quantum sensors that use entanglement as a resource for beating the sensitivity limit of traditional (non-quantum) sensors. Given that the entanglement works at ambient conditions and the fact that SiC is bio-friendly, one particularly exciting application is biological sensing inside a living organism.

"We are excited about entanglement-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging probes, which could have important biomedical applications," said Abram Falk of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center and a co-author of the research findings.

In the long term, it might even be possible to go from entangled states on the same SiC chip to entangled states across distant SiC chips. Such efforts could be facilitated by physical phenomena that allow macroscopic quantum states, as opposed to single quantum states (in single atoms), to interact very strongly with one another, which is important for producing entanglement with a high success rate. Such long-distance entangled states have been proposed for synchronizing global positioning satellites and for communicating information in a manner that is fundamentally secured from eavesdroppers by the laws of physics."

Be Prepared: Al Gore Predicted in 2006 That the Earth Would Die of Heat Death Less Than Two Months From Now.

Al Gore's January 27, 2016 Prediction is Coming Near: The Earth Will End From Overheating

Flashback 2006 to Rush Limbaugh :

"Now, the last time I heard some liberal talk about "ten years" it was 1988, Ted Danson. We had ten years to save the oceans; we were all going to pay the consequences, which would result in our death. Now Al Gore says we've got ten years. Ten years left to save the planet from a scorching. Okay, we're going to start counting. This is January 27th, 2006. We will begin the count, ladies and gentlemen. This is just... You have to love these people -- from afar, and from a purely observational point of view."

News Flash: record snowfall in... oh, never mind.

Here's James Hansen, January 18, 2009:

"Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added.

Obama must have saved planet earth while we weren't watching... What a guy, he hasn't even bragged about it! He's so modest...

Race and the Left

There's an inherent racial regression in the snowflake revolution:

"MAYBE PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT RACES SHOULD ATTEND SEPARATE SCHOOLS, TO ENSURE SAFE SPACE AT ALL TIMES: U. Vermont Holds Retreat for Students Who ‘Self Identify’ as White. I mean, equal, but separate. Woodrow Wilson would approve!"
Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.

So would all Democrats up until LBJ, who discovered that blacks can vote and can be bought on the one hand, and be made scared of the party of Lincoln, who liberated them, on the other hand. All it takes is corruption, which the DNC has aplenty.

Racism is a working value and program for the Left.

If It Is NOT Radical Islam Then What Is It?

DNC Ad Attacking Republicans for Saying ‘Radical Islam’ Is Laughably Stupid
"A new ad from the Democratic National Committee attacks Republican presidential candidates for using the term “radical Islam.” Entitled “Inciting fear isn’t presidential,” the ad argues that the use of the term is offensive to Muslims.

I’ve seen my share of nasty, bizarre, and over-the-top political ads. But this may be the first that I can honestly say is just plain stupid.

To begin with, the ad is horribly tone-deaf. I don’t doubt that the decision-makers in the Democratic Party are horrified by the phrase “radical Islam.” But a new poll released today on the issue found that a supermajority of Americans agree that the United States is at war with radical Islam, including 56% of Democratic voters. Only 24% of the country agrees with the president. So right off the bat, the Democratic Party is attacking Republicans for a stance their own voters agree with.

But of course, the ad attacked Republicans for just saying “radical Islam,” not saying we’re at war with it. Well, 92% of Americans also say “radical Islamic terrorism” is a serious threat to the United States. But hey, at least the DNC is making inroads with that 8%.

To say nothing of the timing behind the ad. Literally any other time of the year, voters might have just rolled their eyes at the unbearable PC-ness of it all. But the DNC ad comes after a series of major terrorist attacks across the globe… and after President Barack Obama gave a speech in response that left the impression that he was more fired up about attacking his domestic critics than taking on ISIS. To attack Republicans for “inciting fear” about radical Islam in the wake of nonstop news about radical Islamic terror is just an unbelievable misfire."